An NPR story delves into the double-edged nature of email, and profiles one firm, U.S. Cellular, that's absolved its workers from having to look at (or respond to, obviously) company emails on Fridays. Drastic measure, or realistic compromise against mindless hours of just click-click-clicking through unimportant chatter? Let's hear from our mail-savvy readers, though: would a day off from email feel like a blessing, or leave you feeling entirely disconnected? How could you plan a day of non-response into your weekly schedule, with software or other time-management techniques? Let's hear your thoughts, and maybe your wishes, in the comments. Photo by respres.

Actually offering up real prices is apparently still too hard, but Vodafone has started sending email to customers who have pre-registered for the iPhone. "We are keen to make sure that we can give you the very best deals on your new iPhone 3G and we are putting the finishing touches to these offers," the email reads. The most sensible way of interpreting this is that there's unlikely to be any new iPhone details in the stores over the weekend, so it might pay to give the staff a break. There's also the unsurprising warning "stocks will be limited so you will need to be quick", suggesting that Vodafone, like Optus, has more demand than supply. If you miss out and you're desperate, you could always pick up a first-gen iPhone on eBay and follow our instructions for one-click jailbreaking.

OpenSuse 11.0, the latest release of the Novell/AMD-sponsored Linux distribution, has hit the download servers. This version incorporates all the latest upgrades to its established packages—including a move up to Firefox 3, upgrading to Banshee 1.0, and all the latest GNOME and KDE 4 improvements—as well as improvements to the installer, package manager, and other SUSE-specific tweaks. The most noticeable change is the baked-in Compiz Fusion support, providing eye-catching animations and subtler desktop flash out of the box. Grab a live CD or installation DVD at the link below.

One of Firefox 3's newest (and most revealing) backend features is its built-in usage tracking—it keeps a running tally of how often you visit a web page over a period of time, which informs the Smart Location Bar's suggestions and creates things like smart bookmark lists of "Most Visited" sites. Smarter features informed by your behaviour are great, but checking out the raw data can offer a whole lot of insight into where and how you spend your time online. Exactly what site have you visited the most since you installed Firefox 3 and how many times did you go there? Here's how to find out.

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Make your online life more productive and more surprising by catching up and following anyone who is already watching you on Twitter. (It's OK to ignore obvious robots, trolls and weirdos). If anyone can recommend a tool that makes sorting through followers easier than Twitter's own rather basic web interface, let us know in the comments.

With another wave of engineering strikes likely to mess up Qantas flights from Monday to Thursday next week, we'll point yet again to our tips on minimising the impact of disrupted and cancelled flights. Got extra strategies? Share them in the comments.

OK, you've picked out a wireless broadband plan you can afford, checked the coverage is OK for your home and office, and made sure it works with your chosen operating system. Reckon you're done? Not so fast, Speedy Gonzales. No matter who you want to buy from, there's a few simple steps you can take to make sure the transaction goes smoothly.

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Anthony Caruana over at Hydrapinion was one of many people who took advantage of recent discounts on the Eee PC. He quickly encountered an issue lots of Eee owners have had: adding new applications is far from easy if you want to use anything other than the limited Asus-approved set of packages. The bigger screen on the 900 and 901 (the latter now due in Australia in June, incidentally) won't help with that.
My own approach to the Eee has been to not add anything -- but then I don't want much more than a browser, a word processor, and a wireless broadband connection, and they're all in the OS already. There are several solutions out there -- ditch Xandros and add a new OS, use a package manager, teach yourself to install from source -- but which one works best for the Eee? Let us know your experiences in the comments.

Mac OS X only: Run multiple versions of Firefox side by side and quickly switch between profiles with donationware application MultiFirefox. If the Firefox 3 hubbub has convinced you to upgrade but not all of your must-have extensions have caught up yet, MultiFirefox lets you get used to Firefox 3 in one window while sticking to your tried-and-true extensions in Firefox 2. From another perspective, switching between user profiles on Macs is a pain, and this app provides a simpler point-of-access to the Profile Manager. MultiFirefox is donationware, Mac OS X only. If all you want to do is run different profiles and you don't want another app to do it, here's how to manage multiple Firefox profiles.

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You've already seen how Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer compare in terms of speed, page load, and memory consumption with Kevin's unscientific (but thorough) performance tests. Now the Webmonkey site offers a snippet of JavaScript that lets you speed-test your browser yourself. This bit of code calculates how long the page takes to load and render completely in your browser—so you can use it on different browsers on your own computer, using your own network connection, to get an interesting comparison. We took the Webmonkey code, modified it slightly, hosted it, and now offer up a bookmarklet so you can test any page rendering speed yourself with a click of your toolbar.

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The DIY hackers at Make magazine detail how to deter thieves from targeting your prized cycle by uglifying your bike. The idea: The less desirable your bike looks to a thief, the less likely they are to steal it from among the throngs of other potential victims. Starting with ugly paint and faux rust and ending with a few tacky stickers, the author suggests several tried and true methods for making your bike appear as undesirable as possible. Keep in mind that the article is also quick to point out that this is not theft prevention—a bike lock is still necessary—but considering how easy it is to steal a bike in broad daylight, a lock plus some skilled uglification could make all the difference.

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Windows only: Freeware application DecaffeinatID is a simple intrusion detection and alert system for your PC that monitors your Windows logs for suspicious behaviour. DecaffeinatID will pop up an alert in your system tray whenever there's an attempted remote login to your computer, and it detects changes in your firewall log, or your ARP changes. The application is currently in beta and not a foolproof intrusion detection system by any means, but it's also not a bad tool to run in your system tray next time you connect to the Wi-Fi at your local coffee shop. DecaffeinatID is freeware, Windows only.

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One noticeable change between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 is the yellow address bar background, which turned on in Firefox 2 when you visited encrypted web sites—the ones that start with https://. After much debate among the developers, Firefox 3 dropped that visual cue, but on Windows, with a little userChrome.css tweak, you can have that yellow background back. Here's how.

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All platforms running Firefox with Greasemonkey: Add a little colour to your RSS feeds with the Google Reader Colorful List view script. This Greasemonkey user script turns each feed item a different colour which depends upon the feed name, offering a fun way to visually ID feeds from the same source in a folder's list view, as shown. Of course, if you read your feeds one source at a time instead of interleaving them, they'll all appear to be the same uniform colour. The Google Reader Colorful List View is a free download that requires Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension.

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Windows only: Free, open-source application Types is a lightweight, user-friendly tool for editing default applications, icons, and context menu options for filetypes in Windows. You can already tweak these settings in the File Types tab of the Folder Options menu in Windows Explorer (Tools -> Folder Options), but frankly, the default tool is overly complicated. Types provides a very simple and intuitive interface for making the same tweaks, and you don't need to dig through the File menu to use it. Types is free, portable, and works in both XP and Vista.

If blinking text on a web page is threatening to give you a seizure—or just making your head hurt—you can disable it in Firefox with a simple configuration tweak. No extension or user script required: just type about:config in Firefox's address bar, press the "I'll be careful, I promise!" button, and then in the Filter field, enter browser.blink_allowed. Change the value for that key from true to false, and you're good to go, no more blinking, ever again. Thanks, David!

Productivity blogger Andre Kibbe knows that he gets distracted early and often by hang-ups, inconveniences, and a school of distractions just waiting to take him away from his tasks. He recommends a form of bad day auditing—looking at every step that happened before you got off-track, and fixing it for tomorrow. Waiting for his laptop to boot, for instance, he pledges to check his action lists rather than zone out.

The basic idea is to mentally step through the day, looking for the forks in the road that compelled you to do X when you know in hindsight that you should have been doing Y. When was the precise moment what your attention shifted to the path of less resistance? What precisely was the distraction?

What daytime distractions always trip you up at work? What clever time uses have you implemented as a fix? Let's hear it in the comments.

Firefox 3's new Smart Location Bar earns its unofficial title of "AwesomeBar" right out of the box. The location bar suggests web site addresses as you type from your bookmarks and history, and learns as you surf, ranking pages you visit more often higher. Still, there aren't a whole lot of ways to configure the "AwesomeBar"'s behaviour in Firefox's default options dialog—but there are a few new Firefox extensions that can do it for you. Here are four Firefox 3 add-ons that adjust the smart location bar's behaviour in small but useful ways.

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The CyberNet blog points out that any Firefox 3 users unhappy with the way their XP/Vista-specific skins look can adopt their browser using two nifty themes—one for re-creating a Vista look on XP, another for XP on Vista. Both themes are experimental and require a Mozilla account, but, as CyberNet points out, that can be bypassed with a quick BugMeNot search.

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